Out of nowhere, Alibaba renames Alitrip travel brand to Fliggy

Alibaba seems content to play around with the branding of its fledgling travel service - renaming Alitrip to Fliggy over the course of the past week.

The Chinese web giant has plenty of muscle in the domestic ecommerce game, so presumably is able to test the water with different concepts around what its foray into online travel should mean to consumers.

Fliggy (Feizhu in Chinese) means "flying piggy", a rather playful take on the idea of attracting Chinese to discover destinations in other countries.

In particular, Alibaba has set its sights on targeting the affluent, Millennial crowd of eager Chinese travellers - thus the cartoon-style logo and approach (although the concept of a pig has drawn criticism from those say it could offend Muslims as they traditionally abstain from eating pork).

The official line is that the new branding has the "aim to provide high-quality outbound travel services that are adapted to the variety of travel requests from the younger generation".

But there will be those, despite the wider worry about a brand the size of Alibaba trying to challenge the Chinese status quo, who wonder if - similar to Amazon last year in the US - the company is still trying to find its way amid huge competition from the likes of Ctrip.

Alitrip first surfaced in late-2014, primarily from the remains of the Taobao Travel service.

At the time it was seen as a significant entrant into the market, because of the resources and wider influence of the Alibaba brand behind it.

Still, outbound - rather than domestic - Chinese tourism appears to be where Fliggy wants to make an impact.

This week, Alibaba celebrated the second anniversary of the travel division by launching online travel packages to the UK, Finland, Italy, Switzerland, Czech Republic and the Netherlands.

The new suite of products, it hopes, will capitalise on the burgeoning market for tourist travel to Europe (some 112 million trips were made by Chinese travellers in 2015, up by 12% on the previous year).

Part of this strategy is to partner with tourism boards in Europe to help raise awareness of destinations to Chinese travellers, including many of the so-called second-tier destinations - such as Finland - that come after the traditional hotspots of London, Paris and Rome.

Alitrip (it retains the name on corporate announcements) president, Shaohua Li, says the Chinese consumer mindset is "changing in a positive way and we are seeing a younger generation of Chinese travellers who have greater access to international travel and a greater desire to explore the world".

"We know that European destinations such Northern Finland and the Northern Lights are things that these Chinese consumers want to experience.
"That is why we are bringing together government tourisim partners and travel service provides to build a better path for the Chinese travelers to find new and special destinations."